So here’s our story: It was my brother who first got into bee-keeping (in 1982). One day he came home and said: “I’ve got three beehives to pollinate the fruit trees.”
And I answered: “That’s great, but don’t think for a minute I’m going to help you look after them…. ”
Well, two of the hives died of American foulbrood and I kind of felt bad for my brother (maybe I felt guilty about the fights we used to have as kids) so I said: “Ok, I’ll buy in. We’ll buy 10 new hives but don’t think for a minute I’m going to help…”
Looking after bees is not easy. You have to understand them, treat their illnesses and my brother really put everything into it.
Then one day he got injured playing soccer and had to stay 30 days with his leg in a cast. He was really worried about his bees and he told me: “If we don’t want to lose them you’ll have to start looking after them.”
That’s how I got roped in.
The first few years we spent looking for the best places to bring them so they could swarm, so they could pollinate other fruit orchards. They were good times but we never imagined that honey-making would become our full time occupation.
The first year we made honey I didn’t want to bring it to a local consorzio (consortium)–as many small, local producers do–so we put it into 500g jars and went to a shop in Via Oberdan in Bologna and convinced them to buy our honey. I think after all our efforts we would have preferred to eat all the honey ourselves rather than sell it to a consortium. Anyway, the shop bought it all and they are still a valuable client today!
After this we decided to experiment by trying different flavors like acacia. This meant another new venture: Nomadism. That means bringing your bees to where the flowers are most enticing… in our case, the northern part of Italy.
So we started organizing the transport of the bees. I remember the first time we left with our bees our father came to help us secure the van. We loaded 50 hives by hand at 11 o’clock in the evening when all the bees had returned home. Then at 2 am we got on the highway headed for Milan.
It was an incredible feeling. There we were bringing these bees all that distance. It was surreal. Instead of going to the beach or on a sailing holiday we were taking 50 extended bee families to pollinate flowers that were growing 400km from our farm.
Then we started to meet other bee keepers on the road, all coming from Emilia Romagna and heading North just like us. It was like some kind of spontaneous-insect-exodus organized by bee keepers as crazy as us!
We arrived at Sesto Calende at 6 am in the morning and left our bees to get on with things.
After two weeks we returned to collect them and found they had made most incredible acacia honey we’d ever seen/tasted; clear as water and full of sweetness.
When we started to sell that first batch of acacia honey we realized we would have to increase our production. Demand was by far outweighing supply so we bought more hives and started to take things seriously.
Since then we have tried many other flowers but for us our acacia honey will always carry a special memory/significance for us. We still sell more acacia than any other flavor.
Looking back it seems that our passion for bees arrived at bit by stealth. Pierpaolo and I grew up in the countryside outside Bologna and we both have strong ties to our land but my love affair with honey is all thanks to my brother. Everything I know about bees comes from him. Now he manages production and I work on the commercial side of things.
In 1995 Pierpaolo decided to compete in the Castel San Pietro Honey Festival. Loads of friends had said they thought our acacia was worthy of an award but after five years of production we’d never tested ourselves. Well, we won first prize and have continued to do so in many other competitions.
There have been occasions when we missed out but this was usually because Pierpaolo forgot to enter the competition (at least 3 times!).
For us it’s a great honor that Whole Foods has chosen to sell our honey in their markets and that Whole Journeys travelers come to visit us at the farm.
I am just sorry that our mother can’t see us now; she’d be so proud!